Lately, every time I have shared my screen on a Teams Meeting with other Sympraxians, they have told me my screen looks awful and I should stop sharing. It sounded unpleasant, but I couldn’t see what they were seeing.

Today, with help from the awesome Emily Mancini (@eemancini), I figured out the issue. From a few searches, we found there are several suggested fixes out there.

Disable GPU hardware acceleration – This tells Teams not to use the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to speed up stuff on the screen. To do this, you click on the ellipses in the upper right of Teams / Settings.

Note that you must restart Teams for this to take effect. This means right clicking on the Teams icon in the system tray and then Quit. This seems to fix a similar issue for many people out there.

Delete the Teams cache – This takes a little more fortitude, and I’m not positive it would help, but the instructions are in the article below.

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But neither of these approaches solved the problem for me. Each time I would do a test call with Emily, I would get the equivalent of the vomit emoji.

I thought back over the timeframe when they had been telling me things were ugly. I recently reconfigured my screens, so I had been fiddling with the settings for each of them: my laptop screen and two external monitors.

As I poked around in those settings, I remembered I’d enabled an appealing-sounding setting called HDR for my laptop screen. This is a setting in Windows 11 that purports the following:

HDR content on Windows offers better brightness and color capabilities compared to traditional content (sometimes called standard dynamic range [SDR] content). Traditional content typically shows details in a bright part of a scene or a darker part of a scene, but not in both parts at the same time. For example, if the shot focuses on a bright window in the scene, details in the shadow are lost. 

What is HDR in Windows 11? (microsoft.com)

Sounds nice, right? Well, that was a change, and it had to do with my screen. I disabled HDR and pinged Emily – one last time as it turned out.

Moral of the story: Teams doesn’t seem to play well with this HDR setting. Don’t turn it on for a screen you’d like to share in Teams (my other two screens had been fine for sharing). Thanks, Emily!

References

• Teams Desktop Sharing Screen Colour Washed out – Microsoft Community
• Teams video showing colors very washed out or black and white : MicrosoftTeams (reddit.com)

I shot myself in the foot today and I figured I’d share how I bandaged it back up. In actual fact, the healing was automagical.

We had a Microsoft Team with its usual backing SharePoint site, and we wanted to reclaim the URL from that SharePoint site. This isn’t an unusual occurrence when there isn’t much governance around Team or site creation. People create Teams with whatever names – and thus URLs – makes sense to them. Retrofitting some governance can take some renaming.

Changing a SharePoint site’s URL isn’t that hard these days. I changed the URL in the SharePoint Admin Center easily. See Change a site address – SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Docs for the steps.

Since we wanted to reuse the URL, the next step was to delete the redirect site which is left behind for the old URL PnP.Powershell. See my post Cleaning Up Redirect Sites in SharePoint Online for how and why you might want to do this.

After the deletion of the redirect site, we realized the team had been accessing the SharePoint site exclusively in Microsoft Teams, so we went to check that the files were still available in Teams. Uh-oh. No, they weren’t.

In Microsoft Teams, the Files tab in each channel was now broken, which is understandable – in retrospect. When we clicked into a Files tab, we got one of the standard “cute” error messages for a Document Library.

Panic ensued, at least on my end. I don’t like it when I break stuff.

I talked to my very smart colleagues at Sympraxis and we couldn’t come up with a reasonable fix for this. It was a good discussion, though, and showed the breadth of knowledge we have among us. I spent some time in Binglage, too, of course.

After a while, I was looking at the Files tabs again, and I noticed the in the General channel’s Files tab was working fine. Hmm. I tried another channel (this Team has 13 channels), and it was broken. I tried another Files tab – also broken. I went back to the first non-General Files tab, quite by accident, and it was working fine again.

Turns out, Teams was able to heal each Files tab by itself. By navigating to each of the Files tabs, navigating to another tab, and navigating back to the Files tab, Teams “fixed up” its connection to the corresponding folder in the SharePoint site’s Documents library. If I caught it right, on a few of the clicks into a Files tab, I saw the following message screen, showing that Teams was working on it.

I’m extremely relieved that Teams was able to self-heal in this situation. While I was incautious in my actions, Teams was smart enough to fix itself for me. This is a sign of the good stuff Microsoft is doing these days, realizing end users make mistakes, and so do people like me, even with a lot of experience.